Tag: Cleaning Tips

Currently our area-Dallas and Fort Worth Texas is in a sellers market. This means homes are selling 0-90 days on the market. It is important to note that it does not mean your home will sell no matter what. The homebuying process is an emotional one: not only is it sad to leave your home you have lived in, but showing and selling that home to complete strangers can be stressfull. The longer your house is on the market the more strangers you have to let snoop around your home and the less likely you are to get the top price. To make this process smooth and sell your house as quickly as possible at the top market price follow these steps.

Minimization is Key. See what I did there? I did not call your beloved sports memorabilia collection or 1,000 framed photos of your dog clutter. Because I understand it is not clutter to you, but you want the future buyers to see how big the living room, kitchen cabinets, and closets are. That means move as much stuff out as possible.

De-personalize. This means remove any family photos, diplomas, or other information that makes a buyer think of you living in this house instead of them living in their future home. I am sure your personal photos are beautiful, but you want the buyer focused on your house and not on where you went to college. You also want them to picture themselves in their new home and not think about who currently lives there.

Repair that leaky faucet. We all know those items on your home that you have just lived with over the years. The leaky faucet, the sqeaky steps, the door that wont shut. It may not bother you, but to your future buyer that is one more thing to fix (aka costs!) which means less money they want to offer you for your house.

Repaint. There is nothing like a clean canvas on walls to help a buyer imagine their decorations in their new home. This requires you to take all items off the wall, patch any holes or cracks, and repaint the whole house. We recommend painting something neutral like a soft grey so it does not distract the buyer from your beautiful house.

Get professional Photos. Once you have fixed all of the items you wanted to fix, cleaned, repainted, and minimalized, get professional photos done. Our brokerage requires us to take professional photos for all of our listings, but not all do. You want great photos because in this world the first look of your home is online of the photos. Buyers will nix a home without even seeing it from photos alone so you want to make sure they portray your home as best as possible!

Finally, trust your agent. Sometimes it can be hard to hear that you need to spend money to make repairs on a house you are trying to sell. But trust them. There is a good chance that you will have to come down on the price or pay more of the closing costs to help the buyer with the cost of the repairs. That is assuming they make an offer on your home because major issues could scare them away from the begining.

Remember that feeling when you move into a new place and realize you have nothing in your fridge? Not even staples like salt, pepper, butter, eggs. I remember when I first moved into my own apartment by myself I realized I didn’t have ketchup. I am not a huge ketchup user, but I had a friend in town and had cooked some type of frozen breakfast bites (shows my cooking skills) that required ketchup and it was never the same. Here on out, I always make sure to buy the “staples” everytime we move.

Now that I am lucky enough to live with a selfproclaimed chef, our list of “staples” has graduated from salt and ketchup. To be honest, Preston is sitting here cringing that I was making frozen breakfast bites for a house guest. We recommend having these on hand if you are learning to cook, trying new recipes, hosting a dinner party, or last minute meal prep for the family. I also use several of these ingredients for “green cleaning.” Below are the Preston approved Pantry Must Haves to always keep on hand that can be used for multiple recipes that we will share:

Apple Cider Vinegar

Olive Oil

Lemons and Limes

Butter (or ghee if you are palio)

Chicken Stock

Carrots

Celery

Brussel Sprouts

Lettuce (and or spinach). We love living lettuce because it lasts forever!

Welcome to Homemade Revival! We are a husband and wife real estate team that loves all things home. You can call us homebodies, for sure. But that does not mean we want to be social. Our main desire for buying a home is to have a space to entertain. Of course there are other perks to purchase real estate (which we will go into on other blog posts), but for us, the ability to entertain at home was a top priority.

My name is Kelly and I love all things design. I originally went to TCU (Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX for those out of state) to study Interior Design. Growing up when the home improvement shows started I remember watching Trading Spaces and realizing that I could make a career out of my passion. I loved rearranging and redecorating my room. My mom (somewhat panicky) remembers leaving me playing in my room as a child and coming back to see I had moved my bed and dresser across the room all by myself. When I was decided on which University to attend to study Interior Design, we laughed when I visited one University that had the dorm room furniture attached to the wall–aka no mid semester rearranging–and knew it was not the school for me. Halfway through college I learned about Marketing and decided to switch my major to Business. This led to spending the last 6 years working at a large corporation trying to following the “logical” side of me to get a good, high paying, stable job. Recently I hit the pause button to follow my heart which lands me here starting this blog while working in the Real Estate industry. Don’t get me wrong, taking this big leap of faith took A LOT of courage and I still play the “shoulda, woulda, coulda” game in my head weekly. BUT I hear my heart screaming at me to follow my passion of being creative through design to make a direct impact on your home.

Meet Preston, my husband. He is born and raised in Dallas, TX (but we wont hold that against him). Ironically I wanted to leave Austin and move to Dallas-Fort Worth, and he wanted to go to UT Austin for college. Luckily for me, Preston was not initially accepted to UT, so he went to TCU instead. Not only is he a kind, loving, supportive, and goofy husband, but he loves to cook. Ya’ll I am not kidding, this boy can COOK. And he LOVES it. He once described it as his stress relief to decompress from the day like when I do yoga (or lets face it veg out on social media). We started sharing photos of the meals Preston made with friends and family and that was when we realized people not only love seeing what he can cook, but they also want his recipes. Preston is passionate about all things historic. As a history major he loves to research how things were made and recreate it today. This goes for meals, cocktails, and home and furniture renovation.

Preston and I are both in real estate and we realized how much the average person is scared of decorating their home and hosting a dinner party at their house especially if it involves cooking from scratch. And this is where the blog Homemade Revival was born. We want to help you make your house a home!